Joseph Palermo: The Republicans think they believe that with enough SuperPAC money and stoking up the base, along with relatively high unemployment and gas prices and millions of underwater mortgage holders, they can win a close election.

Steve Ybarra: Now that Boner blinked, all this talk about the budget got me to thinking, just how much money do we spend on military bases, where are they, and what difference do they make to the average American?

Anthony Samad: At the end of the day, Obama is going to have to look in the faces of his various bases, not those that voted for him because they didn’t have a better choice (they are already gone), but those who really believed in what he was trying to do.

David Love: The Tea Party is not merely a subsidiary of the GOP. It is the GOP. The Tea Party and the Republican Party are one and the same. The Tea Party is the base, and yet the base is all that is left, due to the years of Lee Atwater’s race baiting that drove away all the people who are free from mental defect.

Robert Reich: Average Americans are hurting. But their pain isn’t coming from government. It’s coming from an economy whose benefits are concentrating ever more at the top, whose giant corporations are controlling ever more of our democratic process, and whose costs and risks are becoming ever more burdensome for the middle class and the poor

Sherwood Ross: Although much of Latin America is in the vanguard of the “anti-corporate and anti-militarist global democracy movement,” Grandin writes, the Obama administration is “disappointing potential regional allies by continuing to promote a volatile mix of militarism and free-trade orthodoxy in a corridor running from Mexico to Colombia.” Grandin’s article in The Nation’sFebruary 8th issue is titled, “Muscling Latin America.”

Rev. Irene Monroe: It is my hope that the many conservative faith-based groups and organizations that are now part of Haiti’s earthquake relief effort will not discriminate against Haiti’s LGBTQ community as many of them did toward New Orleans’s queer communities during Katrina.

The Body Politic

Dave Zirin: She is our Jordan. She is our Jim Brown. She is our Babe Ruth, calling his shots. She is no longer content to dodge bullets, but understands how to stop them. Serena is that rare athlete who has not only mastered her sport. She’s harnessed it.